The exquisite explorers

No matter what anybody says, adventurers will have their way

In 1895, a lean, quiet sailor named Joshua Slocum cast off from the harbor of Gloucester, Mass., in a 37-foot sloop named the Spray. A group of people called out to him, "Where away and why alone?"

Where away and why alone? That's what most of us wonder, I think, when we scratch our heads over those people who don't seem to be made of the same stuff as the rest of us. They have a wild gene dancing on the spiral staircase of their DNA, a rogue chromosome.

What they have is something beyond courage, even though it takes courage to make it manifest. It's a kind of ceaseless zeal that keeps the fingers drumming on the tabletop while everybody else is putting their feet up, the kind that makes a certain nerve in the leg twitch, even when they're asleep.

I don't know exactly what to call it, but I know the seven astronauts aboard the Columbia space shuttle had it. Slocum, who wrote about his adventures in a classic tale called "Sailing Alone Around the World" (1899), had it, too. Like the Columbia astronauts, who perished Saturday when the shuttle broke apart minutes before landing, Slocum died doing what he loved: He was lost at sea in 1909.

They all had it. It cost them their lives, but not following their hearts would have cost them far more. They took risks not because they were daredevils or showoffs or crazy fools, but because they knew instinctively that there is something crucial and exquisite about pushing limits, about defying all kinds of gravity: not just the atmospheric kind, but the opinion kind, too, the staid, dreary, authoritative directives that insist, "No, no, no."

They are not like you and me, these explorers, and it's no use pretending otherwise, no use trying to make them seem like regular folks who just enjoy a thrill every once in a while, like visitors to an amusement park.

The seven astronauts, like the Joshua Slocums, like the Robert Falcon Scotts and Ernest Shackletons -- British polar explorers who weathered unimaginable hardships in some of the least hospitable places on earth -- and like the Lindberghs and the Earharts, stand apart. They occur in nature only rarely.

From a Darwinian standpoint, that may be a good thing: The failure rate is high among intrepid pioneers, and the price of failure often is death. The future of the species, you could argue, depends as much upon the more cautious as it does upon the bold, fearless adventurers.

But then again, it's the adventurers who make the species matter.

It's the seven Columbia astronauts. And it's people such as Lynne Cox, the long-distance outdoor swimmer whose article "Swimming to Antarctica" is found in the Feb. 3 New Yorker, an essay that many may have read, as I did, just a day or so before the Columbia catastrophe. I was already thinking about the casual gallantry of explorers and adventurers, about how calm they are in the face of the unknown and its attendant swarm of perils, from Cox's story. "I was forty-three years old, and I needed a project that was more challenging, one that would draw on all my experiences," she writes, "and it suddenly occurred to me that what I wanted to do was swim to Antarctica."

That is not what would occur to most of us on our 43rd birthdays. And it isn't just an adrenaline junkie's aim for the vein, either. As Cox explains, the water in the Antarctic Peninsula can hover just above freezing. "No one knew how far someone would be able to swim in those temperatures, and I wondered what the effect of the cold would be for every degree below thirty-eight degrees."

In the aftermath of Saturday's tragedy, the family members of the shuttle astronauts were magnificent in the many interviews they gave. They were mourning, to be sure, but they were also absolutely steadfast in one idea: Their loved one had died doing what she or he wanted to do, what she or he felt was important. Their sentiments seemed to echo how an anonymous admirer had described Slocum: "A courageous and tenacious confronter of life, a resolute battler with the elements, an asserter against a world he did not make, he had led, not a comfortable life, perhaps, but one from which he demanded meaning."

Meaning, for many of those who undertake extraordinary ventures, is derived from their spirituality -- an ever-evolving sense of something greater than the individual. That's what keeps high adventures from being purely selfish endeavors. They lead outward, not inward, and have the potential to take the rest of us along with them.

The debates have already begun, of course, over the safety of America's space program, especially manned space flight. Many scientists find the latter silly and wasteful; we can get the same information from unmanned flights, using computers and robots. These debates spilled across the Sunday morning talk shows and will continue to rage in the coming week's news stories.